


夜にしか咲かない満月

by noahawk



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Nonbinary Character, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 22:25:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10706394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noahawk/pseuds/noahawk
Summary: re-uploaded because someone tracked me down and asked for it?sorry for taking it down in the first place?;;





	夜にしか咲かない満月

**Author's Note:**

> re-uploaded because someone tracked me down and asked for it?  
> sorry for taking it down in the first place?;;

Hanzo calls you Genji, and you weep silently and in private, grateful. He calls you brother, and you lift your chin, proud. You are ten. That year, on the fifth day of the fifth month, Children’s Day, you choose the same color _koinobori_ as Hanzo’s to fly lowest on the castle tenement, to tell the winds you are the youngest and second son of the household.

Hanzo has three years on you, and sometimes you believe dedication is enough to close the gap of experience and physical growth, when it comes to your training. Sometimes it is. Mother says so, she calls you a swift learner; it sours when says she’s not surprised you came to control your dragon at a faster rate than your brother, as she did in her youth. Father is perceptive, tries in his way to band-aid the rash of implication without apology. He calls you and Hanzo talented with an otherworldly gift, says that he is proud of your progress. Your brother holds his three years over your head in dropping you to the mats of the practice room relentlessly, mercilessly, when you spar. He criticizes the recklessness of your movements you can't seem to help, your stance as he sweeps your feet from under you. Defeat is fuel, results in your adaptation, and the times you best him are especially victorious, when he couldn't pin you or read your feints as truths. You hone this weapon in your arsenal, this unpredictability. You can turn on the head of a pin, and use speed to your advantage. Hanzo, grinning, smug, calls you sloppy. You, grinning, shove him back. You are twelve.

Father calls you his son. Mother calls you her child. For as long as you can remember Mother’s voice is the warmth of a sweltering summer day, oppressive in the way humidity besets one on all sides, sincere and blunt. Her eyes are cool, distant mountaintops whose caps never melt and clouds never turn to rain. You have never seen a difference between Mother, and Shimada Yomi as Head of the Shimada Empire. Father loves her, so you love her. The elders, your grandparents and great grand various-relatives, call you second in line, call you stubborn, call you needs discipline; your cousins call you lucky through their teeth, bruises, and cuts as you best them in training again and again. Your teachers at the private school call your Father with regards to your just-subpar marks and misguided focus. You are fifteen. You jam a scheduled needle into the meat of your thigh with precision learned young, while Father reasons with you to do better, try harder. He is somehow still encouraging, but doesn’t hide his disappointment in your schoolwork. You will do better.

If perseverance, self control, and indomitable spirit will not level you in Hanzo’s eyes, you will be better than him in other ways. You know how seriously he takes himself, his schoolwork, and the responsibilities of ‘first heir’. You laugh more, joke more, watch for opportunities to dispel tense moods with humor until it becomes second nature; until it becomes a defense mechanism. You remind your brother he can laugh, or smile around you, at least, if the rest of the family has banned him from it. Hanzo is nineteen and you are sixteen when Mother chooses the path of ascension, and vanishes one night, on a journey to become the dragon she possesses, the creature that possesses her, to attain immortality. You think it is a lie, until the elders name Father her successor and Head of the Shimada Clan. You never see or hear from Mother again, though the elders insist she still lives. You don’t know if you believe your grand-relatives, because of the spirit dragon that resides in you as well, or if it was a story made up to place Father in power. Hanzo is betrayed, crushed. You know your brother took after Mother most: her fluid, predatory grace and imperial brand of control, seen most clearly in her duty to the clan and its operations. He pushes away your attempts at consolation, and never speaks of her again. You never ask Father why he let her leave, or if what the elders say is true; maybe you suspect from the way he used to look at her that he understood everything about her you did not; that he loved everything about her you did not. You wonder if it is forgiveness you lever towards Hanzo and your Father, and not pity.

You are seventeen. You know a girl in your class at university from an allied _famiglia_ , and she knows you. She is not Japanese. She calls you _koibito_. Fondness and spite render it casual; appropriative. Half-hearted. You hear it, muffled, from between her thighs, and your reply makes the hand she cards through your hair yank hard at your roots, makes her hips lift and cant. She’s loud. She’s called you worse. You know a boy in your class. He is good-looking. Kind. He is no one special to your family, and it takes a little while before you trust that this boy has no other motive, and will not run from your name. He calls you, with plans for ramen and sake, and offers an excuse you might use for not returning home for the night. You are eighteen.

You are eighteen when the elders call upon you to be their blade. They want to submerge you into the red waters you spent your life knowing surrounded you, but until recently had successfully eluded wading into. Their discipline, it seems, is to throw you into the deep end. Where you had watched Hanzo slip beneath the surface as easily as if he belonged, you carefully tread water, wary of ripples you make and the monsters you know who lurk beneath.

The elders call your reluctance cowardice and force your head below. You are twenty two and can see unclouded in the murk of the red, the sea of blood and money that makes up the foundations of your family’s centuries-old empire. You were not deaf all these years to what its reputation was, and to what certain members of the clan did in service to the Shimada. You know you were afforded a certain amount of distance in luxury and heir privilege, but despite all your ties through blood and name, you can't help the revulsion of the weapon you are and the red now on your hands; of the demons you call family, and of the reality of the world you were born and raised in.

You fight back, in ways that strangely matter, at first. Your high marks at university, your frivolous, perhaps obnoxious appearance, your truancy in clan affairs when you are expected to appear beside your brother and Father. You keep yourself sharp, a steady blade, but even tempered steel melts with enough heat and pressure. Your protest turns to escapism, and while you know there is no escaping your pedigree, you can, fleetingly, escape. You use your fangs, your family name, and family money to get what you want, anywhere from neon lit corners of dark, noisy clubs, or the seclusion of their VIP rooms, to the cold glow of flickering screens where games are sinks for time and coin. You become better than Hanzo at things that don't matter at all-- that stoic, disdainful, permanent scowl of his has nothing on the carefully contrived looseness of your shoulders, the swagger in your walk, your impetuous smile. You know Father still makes excuses for you behind the closed doors of business meetings you won’t attend. You flirt with an idea to destroy yourself before the elders break you: you are twenty three and already weary, and you are afraid to break.

You are twenty four when Father dies. The elders claim with somber faces it was due to health complications. You don’t know who to believe: Father wasn’t in the best health, but he wasn’t so frail to be in danger of dropping dead. Hanzo is crowned as Head, and something about him congeals into someone you don’t fully recognize. The clan elders think they have you cornered, caged. You used to wonder how your brother stayed steps ahead of you, regardless of years. You’ve stopped wondering; you know. You cut your brother off, more than a few words between you now devolves into verbal altercations, and you would rather save your breath, for once. You used to think you had stepped off a proper path before, and now you wander far off shore. Lost. Angry. Grieving. Still tethered by name and by blood, mistrustful and losing the trust of the clan. That should matter to you; that should scare you. You can’t bring yourself to care. You stalk many times from the castle grounds into surrounding Hanamura in search of a fuck or a fight, and have no excuse for when you do not return home for the night.

There are no longer any _koinobori_ that fly on the castle grounds in the spirit of honoring your family on Children’s Day. You think it looks pitiful, with just two remaining, and you and your brother have not been children nor innocent for what feels like lifetimes. Hanzo still calls you his brother. When you spit in his face and renounce your family’s operations and the empire he has dedicated his life to, Hanzo calls you a traitor and a disgrace. He calls you worthless. Tensions between you are no longer able to be dispelled, either by tactical retreat or attempted humor. This is not a spar; this is not intended for more than one of you to walk away. The fight does not end when your brother drops you to the concrete and you, more so than him, are carved, draining red and struck with blade and shuriken. He calls upon his dragons to carry out judgement against you, one you want to believe is not wholly his own. You do not defend yourself: you do not want to blame your brother or hurt him more than you already have, and a small, furtive part of you is even glad for the end. So you burn, still conscious, in the twining blue inferno. You will die at twenty five. From the darkness that coils around you, you watch Hanzo’s tilted silhouette limp away, and can’t tell if the ethereal beast’s voice that echoes in your head rages at your brother or yourself: _why why why why why why why why_

She is called Doctor Angela Ziegler, they are called Overwatch. You have heard of them, grown up with the name for ending the omnic crisis and later for a thorn in the clan’s side. You don’t remember giving consent to wake up in this new body, or how you gave that consent, but as proof she shows you recorded holofootage of when you were brought in charred from defeat, and the brief conversation, if it can be called such, of permission to save your life. You push away desaturated images of what gruesomely little remained of you in the vid, only to fall entrenched in this new carnage of wires and grafts and synthetic sinew. You grasp at anything-- anyone-- else, to keep from drowning; even just observing helps. You cannot help and do not fight that your eyes often rest on the doctor. She is gentle, inescapably pretty, and tired in a way you distinctly recognize. You admire her dedication to help and to heal, her prowess in engineering medical technology. It is not something you have encountered before. You have known exceptionally skilled doctors and specialists even in Hanamura, but what Ziegler seems to embody is the opposite of what you have spent your life surrounded by and, sometimes, dealing. She asks you to call her Angela. She calls you Genji. When tears fall on your face it only stings, salt in your raw, scarred skin, and you can’t say if what you feel is gratitude, or heartbreak. You are given a season to heal and adapt to your cybernetic prostheses, to your surroundings at the watchpoint, and to your teammates. Some of them require adaptation. He is called Gabriel Reyes, and you are called new Blackwatch recruit. Reyes doesn’t hide his unease of you, of what the doctor has made of you, but he respects your skills, and you his. You know why they brought you back, gave you your life for a deal. You see the waters surrounding them, the tides Overwatch tries to influence. You know the red in the waves that Blackwatch stirs, the undercurrent lurking beneath. You wade in willingly on new limbs and new organs, and disappear beneath the surface to hunt down the monsters responsible for your death.

Your family does not recognize you when you spill their blood in an orbit around Shimada Castle, nor when you cut down the elders responsible for your Father’s death, or the ones who had spent so long gently, violently, pulling Hanzo’s strings. The irony when they call you _kaiju_ , _bakemono_ , with breaths bubbling from punctured lungs, is acid. You and those you slay belong to an international crime organization and your cousins call you the monster. You are twenty eight and, for the first time, feel truly caged: between machine parts and organic tissue, between blood and coolant. Between humanity and… you’re not sure what to call an opposite of being human. You have not felt such dissonance within yourself since you were a child. So you call yourself broken, despite your enhanced physical strength and abilities, despite being a perfectly designed weapon. You even briefly had clarity of purpose, a path of revenge those of Blackwatch call righteous. You call yourself broken despite widely accepted terms that exist for individuals who do not or no longer experience any number of basic human urges.

You are twenty nine when you vanish one night, much like Mother had, from the watchpoint, and hope no one there called you family enough for you to inflict the same hurt. In the flow of your fitful wanderings nearly a year later, you hear in the news when the UN calls for Overwatch’s dissolution with the signing of the Petras Act. Winston attempts to contact you to attend burial services for Morrison and Reyes after what has happened at the Swiss base, but you do not answer. You do not have the heart. You are thirty.

There is an omnic you meet in your travels, who calls you wayward, who latches onto you doggedly. You call them wasting their time, and excuse yourself from their presence. There is a limbo you have been caught within for the past couple of years since leaving Overwatch: you are not fully human, and yet not an omnic, but between them both they mistake you for the other, or call you not enough of either to belong. Zenyatta calls you their student, the next time you meet, when you find your way to the remote mountain village weathered in snow. You are thirty one, and you are close to the sky, here, far away from seas steeped in blood and volatile tradition, far from pain and pressure of expectation. The cold numbs, frees you from distraction in a way you have not known before, and you dare to call it home, for a short while. Zenyatta calls you stubborn, a slow learner, and you have never been happier to hear it, despite the way your thoughts are resolute to spiral back down to the red waters far below you, close behind you. The omnic insists, with inflection that belies personal experience, that this path to finding peace within and of yourself will be arduous, and it scares you in ways facing enemies never did. You are afraid of admitting you lack what you think makes you human-- alive-- at a basic level. You fight yourself and for yourself, and slowly, you learn to reconcile your mind and body with what you are and who you are, and who you have been.

Zenyatta calls you their friend. You both depart from the Shambali, after your mentor confesses a misalignment of methods and ideals with the order of monks and it's leader, Mondatta. You are reluctant to leave, but you know what it's like to stand on different ideological footing than your brother. You descend from the mountains to walk the earth to help it heal, as Zenyatta believes, through personal connection and living by example. You will help your friend find their way as surely as they have helped you. You both spend your thirty fourth birthday without event in Numbani, in pursuit of music, among a city that claims omnic and human harmony.

You are thirty five. You keep your family name out of sight and out of mind. Zenyatta’s brother, on the other hand, has made ripples in the world in the name of Tekhartha. The Shambali encourages peaceful coexistence and offers compelling cause for omnics’ equal rights, and has gained international following that longs for compassion and healing from the damages done in the face of the first omnic crisis. Yet there are powers in the world who are better served by the suffering of others, and fear, hate, and greed trail tragedy in their wake. You and Zenyatta are south of Li Jiang, staying the night with a gracious host and his family, watching Mondatta’s speech on London, when the Shambali is assassinated on the live feed. The broadcast cuts, a dead signal drone left in its place. Your soul aches for your friends, for those who looked to Mondatta for hope and progress; it burns at the injustice, the loss. You can see how humans and omnics alike in the family, and in the populace around you, are affected, and cope in varying stages of grief. In the following weeks you do your best to offer Zenyatta support. From their quiet reminiscing you learn much about Mondatta, and your friend’s regrets in how they left Nepal, what they might have said or done differently before parting ways with the rest of their Shambali brothers and sisters. You have unending respect for your mentor, how they accept and process their grief and the concept of death, though you may not fully understand-- that life and death are one, that within the Iris, the true self is without form. Not for the first time do your thoughts turn to your own brother, and the chasm between you. It has been ten years since he left you for dead. Zenyatta understands your decision, and reassures that your paths will cross again, when you tell them you intend to search for Hanzo. This time, your departure is benign, and you wish your mentor well on their journey.

You return to Shimada Castle on the fifth day of the fifth month. It surprises you that Hanzo also returns, and has been returning, for the sake of honoring your memory. He now carries a bow and quiver, kneels in penance before the sword you recognize as his. He has three years on you and there is grey at his temples; he looks as though he carries the weight of this world and the next on his shoulders. You do not know how to reappear in your brother’s life, if you could bear his presence, or he yours, or if he would even believe it is you. It breaks your heart, the human, flesh and blood heart, to see your brother suffering so, especially when you know first hand that healing is possible. You know you have already forgiven him long ago.

Your reunion is as follows: Hanzo mistakes you for an attempt on his life. You test him, his abilities and yours, what tricks he has up his archer’s sleeve. You fire pieces of your shared history at him to get a rise, and find your brother is the same-- serious and stubborn. He snarls like a cornered creature, all hackles and fangs and bite. This is not a spar; it is not a discussion of sides, but still you pry, not with questions but with words that cut like shuriken, and you bleed contempt into your tone when you pin him, mocking his method of coping. Hanzo counters with a declaration of your worth that slaps like a backhanded compliment, catches you off guard. He leverages your hesitation and throws you to the ground, but his weaponry makes your brother break proximity to retrieve ammunition. You regain your footing easily and read the anger and abandon in his stance just before he strikes, when he recites the incantation that calls his dragons forth. You have dreamt of the blue beasts that do your brother’s bidding, in nightmares, and in reinventions of the hour that cast you both to this present. It is here you do not falter, and summon your own dragon to defend yourself, and to reveal your identity to him. Green carves the air around you, cuts a path with its fiery brethren to deflect Hanzo’s dragons back at him. You wonder if it is disbelief or defeat that drops your brother to his knees, and you test his plea for death when you hold his life on the edge of a blade. Instead, you tell your brother what you hope he needs to hear: that you have forgiven him for what he’s done, and that there is still hope for him. You hope he sees this as a second chance not to waste, as you were once given. He does not push away your hand on his shoulder, and despite his apprehension at what you have become, and the arrow aimed at your back when you leave, Hanzo still calls you Genji, still calls you brother. You decide, for now, that it is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> was going to redo this but never got around to it. thanks all who had kudos'd / commented / bookmarked in the past <3


End file.
